Chapter Seven
This was his truth, even if it sounded unreal and convoluted.
For a long while, he didn’t say anything.
Seraphina wanted to know who this man really was and why he’d confessed to a brutal murder he hadn’t committed.
But she had to wait, because he was in pain, and she could hear him grunt and take sharp inhales as he cleaned his wounds with the cloth he dampened in the little water that was left at the bottom of the water bucket.
She bit her lip and pressed her hands into her eye sockets.
Her head ached, her whole body ached, and she couldn’t stop her thoughts from racing.
Hartmann was going to kill her. Not with his own hands, but he would find a way.
In a few days, he’d see Rune had no intention of doing his bidding, and then whose cell would she be thrown in next?
Just thinking about it made her dry heave again.
There was no solution to the mess she was in.
Rune let out a shuddering breath, and Seraphina felt profoundly guilty.
He’d taken a beating for her. He shouldn’t have stood up to the guards, shouldn’t have attacked them in trying to protect her.
Hartmann had just thrown her back into his cell, so why did he have to lunge at them like that?
His behavior made no sense. They barely knew each other, yet he’d offered to kill for her, and now he’d put himself in danger because of her.
She’d never asked it from him. The things she’d shared…
that was just her making conversation, unburdening her soul. She’d never expected him to care.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
“Not too bad. Don’t worry about me.”
Damn it, but she did worry! She wanted to help him.
She could turn around right now and check his wounds, see where it felt tender, make sure no bones were broken.
Instead, she hung her head, letting her long, dirty hair act like a curtain.
Without the scarf to cover her face, she’d never have the courage to reveal herself.
Besides, he didn’t want her to see his face either.
The guards had called them both ugly – the ugliest things they’d ever seen – so maybe, Seraphina shouldn’t have felt so self-conscious.
If he was deformed too, he’d understand her condition.
She held her breath and counted to ten, promising herself that at ten, she’d turn around.
Ten, eleven, twelve... She kept counting.
She reached twenty, her lungs burned, and she dragged in a breath, shaking her head violently.
No, she couldn’t do it. She wrapped her arms around herself and gently banged her forehead against the wall, not enough to cause herself harm, but enough to punish herself for being a coward.
On the other side of the cell, Rune lay on the ground.
Seraphina could hear him. She was acutely aware of his every move, breath, and every small way in which his body shifted.
It was as if she listened with her whole being, and could sense the space between them, her cells attuned to how the stale air stirred and shaped around them.
“Will you tell me why?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “Why I lied?”
“Yes.”
“Does it matter? I’m here because I want to be here.”
“No one wants to be here, Rune. Prison is a death sentence. You’re given straw and a blanket, the cells aren’t heated in winter.
Soon, snow will fall through the window right onto the floor.
If you’re bothered by how loud the prison is at night, get ready for frozen silence in the next few weeks, because half of the prisoners will be dead from frost sickness or pneumonia.
Why would an innocent man subject himself to any of this?
Do you have a death wish? Because if you do, I won’t judge, only tell you there are easier ways to go. ”
He was silent.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he whispered.
“Anything you want, as long as it’s true.”
“Why?”
“Why... what?”
“Why do you want to know?”
She sighed and sucked her lower lip between her teeth.
Indeed, why did she want to know? Because she felt guilty for having treated him like shit the past few days?
Eaten his food, taken over his cot, left him without his blanket?
Because she worried about him, felt responsible for the state he was in?
Because all this time, while she was busy coming up with grim scenarios in her head, he’d protected her, listened to her.
He cared. She was starting to care about him, too.
“I told you things about myself,” she said, finally. “It’s your turn. It’s only fair.”
“No one has ever asked me about myself,” he said. “So, I don’t know... where to begin.”
“You can begin with where you were born.”
“No.”
His refusal came so fast and definitively that Seraphina felt a pinch of anger in her chest. He was impossible.
Why was she even trying? Even if he hadn’t killed those women, he was hiding something, and it was probably horrible, since he wouldn’t even tell her where he was born.
There was no point in asking him what his last name was, or how old he was.
“I’m not used to wide, open spaces,” he said, his voice sounding apologetic.
“Before, I lived in a small place. It was cramped, but it was mine, and it felt familiar and safe. Then my home burned down, and I found myself on the streets, and it was... too much. The vast sky, so much air that my lungs hurt trying to breathe it all in, the sun, the rain, the river. And so many new smells, so strange and foreign. I didn’t know what to do with all of it. It frightened me. The world is so big.”
He started hyperventilating as he spoke.
“I didn’t know how big the world was. Never had imagined it.
To be in the middle of it, alone and exposed, people rubbing against me in the market, yelling at each other.
.. I tried to find the narrower alleys, to stick close to the walls, huddle in corners at night, but there were rats, and it was never quiet.
Dogs barking... Did you notice how dogs bark all the time, day and night?
Men stumbling in the dark, drunk. It was only quiet before dawn, and I’d sleep a little before hunger woke me up, but I had no money.
I had to steal to survive. A loaf of bread here, an apple there.
“Then one night, I found her. She was lying on the ground, naked from the waist up, arms and legs spread wide. Her eyes were open, glassy, staring at the sky. She was cut from her belly to her collarbone, the skin and muscle pulled apart to reveal her insides. Her ribs were cracked open. The edges were precise, as if whoever had done that to her had taken their time. And they’d also taken her heart, which was missing.
There was blood everywhere. I got it on my boots, my coat, my hands when I reached over to close her eyes and cover her as best as I could with her torn dress. ”
“My God,” Seraphina whispered. She wasn’t a believer, but she crossed herself, in case the dead woman had been.
“It struck me that if I turned myself in for the crime, they would lock me up, and I wouldn’t be out in the open anymore, alone in a world I didn’t understand.
They’d give me a meal a day, at least, and they’d leave me be.
I’d have a place to sleep, and I wouldn’t have to feel crushed by the sky, wouldn’t have to listen to the river rushing, and the people yelling, and dogs barking. ”
He paused, breathing in and out for a minute to calm himself.
“Well, it turned out prison isn’t as quiet as I’d hoped, but I still get a few hours of peace. And I can’t see the sky unless I lift myself on my toes and crane my neck. The space is exactly as I need it. Small and all mine. I breathe better here than out there.”
“I don’t understand,” Seraphina murmured. “Your home burned down. You lived in a single room and never went out.”
“Yes.”
That didn’t clarify anything for her. She was glad he was finally opening up and talking about himself, but nothing he’d said so far made sense. The mystery of Rune wasn’t untangling as he spoke, it was deepening.
“I was starving on the streets,” he said. “Afraid of my own shadow. This is better.”
Seraphina couldn’t imagine Rune being afraid of his own shadow.
Afraid of anything or anyone, really. He’d just stood up to three guards armed with clubs and bayonets.
He wasn’t lying, though, that much she could tell.
This was his truth, even if it sounded unreal and convoluted.
Maybe he didn’t know how to express himself, and that made his story so confusing.
“I’m sorry you lost your home,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Was it... far from here?”
He thought for a few seconds. “I walked for two days. Avoided the main roads, tried to stay out of sight.”
“And you came... from the north?”
“From the south.”
A chill spread through Seraphina’s bones. It was the nervous energy leaving her body, taking the heat it had generated in her veins with it. It was also Rune’s revelation.
“A two-day walk on foot, through forest and fields if you avoided the roads, coming from the south,” she said. “That’s the High Harvester’s territory.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? The Harvester and his army control Munich and the lands extending south and west from the capital. You crossed the front line, and no one saw you, no one stopped you. How did you enter Ingolstadt? No one comes in or goes out of the city without being checked.”
“I noticed that. I stalked the gate for a while, then climbed over the wall after dark. The stones are old. Easy to find handholds.”
“You climbed over the wall?!” She said it louder than she intended. “Rune, I asked you to tell me anything you want, anything at all, as long as it’s the truth. No one can climb over the city wall.”
“I can...”
So, he wasn’t backing down. She remembered what Fischer had said in his high-pitched voice as blood was probably gushing from his nose. “How is he so strong?”